Tyler Cowen: commitment

Transcript context

…Inasmuch as you’re focused on economic growth in order to increase sustainability, it seems like a slightly odd focus, at least for an individual to take, if they wanted to increase sustainability because there are already such strong incentives that many people face to try to grow the economy because they earn money from it. They earn either labor income or returns from starting a business. If a single person wanted to maximize sustainability of human civilization, would you recommend that they focus on economic growth? Or do you think that there’s more leveraged opportunities if they want to set aside making money? It depends on the person and what kinds of talents they have. But as I argued in my earlier book, The Complacent Class, there now seem to be so many people who are simply satisficers. They’re not very interested in innovating or even participating in a dynamic economy, and they just try to do well enough. I’m here making a moral argument that at the margin, many, many people should be less complacent and take more chances. Personally, I will lower aggregate societal risk and do more to innovate, save more, work harder, in some way be more dynamic. You can think of this and Complacent Class as two sides of a bigger picture. Complacent Class is like the sociology of what we’re doing and this is the moral side. It seems like another technology that you might be very interested in that could have big effects on the trajectory of human civilization, and potentially avoid extinction — although it also could be very negative — would be the capacity to redesign human motivation and our personalities through genetic engineering. We could potentially select our children such that they are, say, very pacifist, such that they don’t want to kill one another. If you could get large take-up of this technology, that could potentially lower existential risk and get it very close to zero and give us more brighter prospects of surviving for a long time. On the other hand, the ability to redesign human personalities such that we’re so passive and will just accept dominance would potentially, again, facilitate totalitarianism and a very stable bad or neutral state. What do you think of that?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.